This text considers the early creative output of Ignác Cornova, in particular his lesserknown odes and his war poetry. It draws on contemporary research of the latter third of the 18th century focussing on the dynamic social change of the period, the transformation of the media, the emergence of a modern ‘public’, and changing perceptions of artistic as opposed to educational output. One of the difficulties of conceptualizing this period is the existence of two opposing trends – the older ‘Baroque’ tradition and the more ‘modern’ currents of the future national movement. Our text largely obviates this dichotomy by proposing a framework in which Cornova’s oeuvre is seen as evidence of an idiosyncratic cultural situation with its own features and markers. The aim of our study is to place Cornova’s early works within the literary context of his time – a context hard to appreciate today. We are not looking for the ‘future’ Cornova in those beginnings, nor the ‘embryos’ of his later development. Rather, we hope to rehabilitate the literary context in the Czech lands in the 1770s and 1780s as it veered between late Baroque odes, war reportage, and enlightenment patriotism. Alongside Cornova we consider now forgotten figures such as Vojtěch Koťara, Michael Denis, Johann Joseph Eberle and Václav Thám. The result is not a group biography, but rather a problem analysis of one segment of a period that defies unequivocal definition.
It is two hundred years since the first biographers of Ignaz Cornova – ex-Jesuit scholar, Prague university professor and member of the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences – mentioned his articles written for periodicals, but to date these remain unstudied. They have been neither collected nor analysed; we do not even know how many periodicals he contributed to. In his research on the subject, the author has identified six periodicals in which Cornova published between 1793 and 1814 and found thirteen separate texts – a figure that is almost certain to rise. His analysis of these articles supplements and refines the conclusions reached by historians on the basis of Cornova’s writings in book form. He is presented as a historian of Bohemia (and beyond), a Czech patriot, a Catholic, and a loyal subject of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine who was committed to educating society as a whole, especially in the field of history, and maintaining social peace.
The varied and contradictory perception of the personality and work of Bohuslav of Lobkowicz and Hassenstein in the early modern period was symbolically crowned in the Enlightenment by Ignaz Cornova’s biography, which is still the most comprehensive work dedicated to Hassenstein. After a brief recapitulation of research and the state of knowledge before Cornova, the study examines his approach to the material and the main substantive and formal features of his biography. Older Latin literature dealing with humanism plays an important role, as do contemporary models from the European literatures of the Enlightenment. Cornova’s work partly follows the traditional chronological approach, but several timeless chapters emerge from it, driven both by an interest in Bohuslav as an individual and by a desire to make a purposeful pedagogical impact on the reader. His aim was to present a rounded and engaging picture of Hassenstein’s life and literary output, based on his surviving works, especially his poems and correspondence, tastefully and without distracting remarks and comments. Ludwig Schubart, for example, with his biography of the German humanist Ulrich von Hutten, could have been a model for him in this respect. Brief mention is also made of the critical reviews of Cornova’s work, which he himself deals with in the preface to Hassenstein’s biography. A separate section is devoted to a comparison of the selection of poems translated by Cornova and his contemporaries Thám, Vinařický and Budík. Although the biography was considered Cornova’s most important work in his lifetime, was cited and received positive feedback, it is not very useful for contemporary research, unlike the works of Josef Truhlář, who was a few decades younger. From a scholarly point of view it falls short of contemporary demands and as a literary work is even more outdated, although (or perhaps because) it reflected the literary trends of the time.
In this study we consider the comedies of Ignaz Cornova. Locating his plays within the landscape of late 18th century genres, we examine the specific use the writer makes of contemporary dramatic conventions and the way in which he engineers the social reconciliation that characterizes his comedies. First we take a closer look at the dramatic construction of his plays and compare them with the comedic output of his contemporaries active in Bohemia. We then focus on Cornova’s particular use of the language of comedy, of which we find echoes in his many and varied writings on culture and politics. Finally, we address the issue of relations between the social estates or classes. Our conclusion shows that the storylines Cornova rehearses in his comedies are later exploited in his historical writings and may thus be considered as the author’s recipe for pacifying the social conflicts of the period.